Hey! I appreciate the compliments. Thank you.
Creative process. This is all digital art. When it comes to certain things, I keep a lot of the trade secrets to myself. I'll often use tools in ways they weren't designed to be used to get certain effects, but not always. I use many different sizes of the airbrush tool at varying pressures and a virtual rubbing technique to blend things when desired. I rarely use high tech tricks that make life easy. I never apply a push button filter or things like that. The Double Down piece was a bit of fun with the mirror tool. I guess that would be similar to a tool that has 4 chalk sticks. Move it once, get 4 lines in different places. Details were added later though, so not everything is precisely mirrored.
The top three were all produced on a single layer. The bottom one, I Wish I Could Fly, was produced using multiple layers. Much like physical art, except I don't have to wait for the paint to dry to get the desired effect.
I do like to keep many of my secrets though. There's a reason why my stuff doesn't look like all the other stuff. I want to keep it that way!
Oh, don't worry-- I wasn't planning on stealing your secrets! I was just curious.
Personally... I was doing everything with GIMP and made heavy use of the Filters menu to generate cool looking wallpapers and stuff. They looked neat, but never anything like real "art", you know?
But that was all years ago when I was unsure whether I wanted to pursue my creative side or programming. I like to leave the artwork to the experts these days. My left brain won the struggle :)
I can always tell when someone is trying to pass off a push button effect as art. All they really need to do is tell people that it's an altered PHOTO, but for some reason I guess they don't think there's a market for that. There is though. Oh well. Their loss.